Pages

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Things are much better now. I turned the corner on the bronchitis on Sunday. I'm still coughing up glop, but I'm feeling good and didn't miss any work.

My second eye surgery yesterday went well, and I think that they did not use as much of the dilating medicine this time around because my right eye is returning to normal a bit more quickly than my left one did. It's not all the way back to normal, but I suspect it will be by tomorrow.

Since the right eye is still somewhat dilated, things are still a little blurry - but I am using the computer and my cell phone without glasses. This is miraculous. I'm not kidding. Everything is much brighter, and I often feel now that I'm in a 3-D movie. I can see all the leaves on the trees rather than a large blob of green. It's startling. :-) I have lots of drops to use for another few weeks, but that's pretty easy to do.

I'm anxious for the dilation to go down so that I can see if all the blurring really goes away. I believe that it will. I have another post op check a week from Saturday. I'll know more then, but I did pretty well this morning with the vision checks that they did, and although I obviously have cheaters with me still, it's weird to use them. I think I might have to drop back down to 125's and then only have them on hand just in case. I truly don't anticipate using them again.

A friend pointed out to me that really big dramatic things happen in my life. I never thought about it before, but I guess she's right.

Last fall, in November, I was involved in a bad car accident. It wasn't my fault. My car was totaled, and although I was pretty banged up, nothing was broken. I didn't miss much work - although in retrospect I should have stayed home quite a bit longer. It was about three months before I started to feel like myself again. I ran across the photos of my injuries last week. Wow. They were pretty awful. Thankfully, at the time of the accident Linda the Chicken Lady and her Hannah Dog were staying with me prior to their relocation to Northern California. They both took great care of me during the worst of it. Then, when I was feeling better, the construction started and lasted for another three months. I'm still trying to recoup from that and get the house back to normal. Now I've had eye surgery - a big thing for me even though it all went quite smoothly - and a round of bronchitis (which I believe I also had in December if I'm not mistaken) because you know, when you have asthma, you never get to have "just a cold." It's always more serious and usually entails an infection and unnaturally colored glop gacking up out of my lungs. Yeah. Ick.

So, as I think on it, it's been about six months of crazy and, frankly, I haven't done all that well through it in terms of taking good care of myself. I marvel at how easy it is to slip back into poor food habits so quickly . . . really. I'm not kidding. Habits I thought were long behind me. Not so much, I'm afraid, and now I have to work to put them behind me again. But I'm back to tracking my food. That will be helpful. I'm planning on walking more. That will be helpful. I'm planning on sleeping more. That will also be helpful. And, I'm working through The Artist's Way again with my friend, T. We start our Week 1 check-in on Sunday. I have found that The Artist's Way is an excellent tool for helping me focus, and since I also have been feeling very creatively blocked of late, it's going to be very very helpful for that, too.

So, yeah, big dramatic things. And yet . . . I continue to be very, very lucky. I was in the accident in the new car - three months old to the day. Had I been in my old car, I would have been seriously injured or killed. As it was, the new car saved my life. And I got to get another new car - this time, a 2015 Subaru Forester with their Eyesight Technology. The safest car on the road. A dear friend was staying with me at the time of the accident so she could come and retrieve me from the accident site, take me to the ER, and care for me for a few weeks. I had a wonderful contractor for the construction and he and his crew feel like family members now. I love everything we did in my home. For the past few weeks it's been raining like mad here - flash flood amounts of rain - and my basement is as dry as a bone. REALLY happy about that. I can see out of both of my eyes now, and I probably won't need cheaters any more.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Sometimes, when we don't listen, our bodies take over and make us listen.

On Wednesday, I had cataract surgery on my left eye. We get cataracts early in my family. The average age to have a cataract removed is 72. In my family we get them a couple of decades earlier. It went very well, but wasn't the greatest of experiences. The car service insisted that they knew better than I what time they should be at my house to pick me up: 7:15 a.m. for an 8:30 a.m. surgery on the north side of the city during rush hour. Oh HELL no . . . but they insisted - the dispatcher acted like I was a moron and said she knew what she was doing . . .

So, yeah, I didn't get to the surgery center until 9 a.m. Then, I thought I was having an asthma issue because my lungs were tight and I was coughing. So, naturally, I was taking hits on my inhaler and was nervous that I was going to cough and they'd poke my eye out.

Long story short, the surgery went great, but I'm now labeled a "difficult" patient because I was nervous. Oh well.

Turns out I was not having an asthma issue - I was having a cold/bronchitis/who knows what issue. I felt terrible the next day when I went for my post op checkup and the eye doc said to drink something carbonated - that actually helped. By Friday I was not at all in good shape and my own doc called a Z-pac in to Walgreens for me.

Today I was supposed to be across the state judging the Illinois state African violet show. That didn't happen for me and the cough is so brutal that my entire upper torso is sore and my throat seems to coughed raw. This is the NoFun Plan for sure.

I'm miserable and crabby and because I dozed through the hockey game (Go Hawks!) now I'm not particularly sleepy and it's almost 11 at night.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

It's early. I have a lot to do today, but thought a quick blog catch up might be in order!

I finished my Hume sweater and it's sitting on the "to block" pile in my guest room along with a cowl and a shawl that I finished during construction. I do love me some Norah Gaughan patterns! The sweater is currently a little small for me because I started it forever ago and have gotten a little larger. But I'm remedying that so I anticipate that I will be wearing it a lot this fall. The guest room is still somewhat of a staging area from the construction, but I'll get that sorted soon because Linda the Chicken Lady is coming for a visit from where she lives now in Northern California! Really there's not much to do in the guestroom, I've just let it linger. I should be able to put it back together in an hour or so.

I rebooted my podcast, All About African Violets, for a second season, which means I went back into regular weekly production at the very end of May. The plants have been neglected for about six months and I thought that would be a good continuing focus for the rest of this year. No idea how long this season will last - but there are still a lot of people I would like to talk to and interview . . . so we'll see how it goes :-)

A quick load of laundry is in the dryer and I'm about to jump in the shower. I'm being picked up at 7:15 and driven to the north side to have the first of two cataract surgeries. Yikes! I am a little nervous - I mean, it's my EYE - but I feel that everything will be well. We get cataracts early in my family, and the one in my left eye has been bothering me now for some time. When the doctor examined my eyes and got to the left one, he said, "Wow . . . . . this must be driving you CRAZY." Um, yeah, I noticed that it had definitely progressed - and now when I hold my hand over my right eye, I can't really see anything out of my left. It's like there's a heavy coating of Vaseline.

I'm surprised I haven't had more headaches - I mean my right eye is doing pretty much all the work and has been for some time. They'll do the right eye next week. The reason they are doing them both one after the other, is that I've opted for what they call multi-focal lenses. That means that you have to have both eyes done because the lens need to work together. As best I can tell, it's like having progressive lenses IN my eye. Supposedly I'm not supposed to need cheaters any longer. I guess we'll see. ;-)

About Me

I'm gloriously unfinished - every day is an adventure on my journey of health and wellness. There is knitting on the way, but most important is this: Life is short, so dance like no one's watching. I'm glad you stopped by and hope you'll keep coming back :-)